The 20-year-old grandson-of/property-manager-for my landlord is leaning against the building next door, enjoying a late summer daydream, his boyish limbs a-languor, his meditation central and deep. And secret. He is tall and blonde though not stunningly handsome, and cordial but not particularly charming, yet nonetheless I find moments of him – such as this secretly stolen spectre – especially delightful.
The determined reader will have found that much of my writing is (and I am not proud of this) a ponderous mass of whining and self-pity. The casual reader never stays, I think. The reason for my depressed style is perhaps the same reason that I am fascinated by this plain boy outside my window; regret.
I read, in Bono’s commencement address to Harvard, “…Is missing the moment unacceptable to you ? Is wasting inspiration a crime? It is for a musician.”. I must therefore be a musician. (!). I am no more a musician than I am a writer, but I am so in love with the moment and the inspiration that I am stuck lamenting their loss. It’s like I am focussing on everything not just as I am receiving it as a free gift form the universe, but just as it has passed; as if choosing a vantage point in the lull of the wave’s wake is preferrable to riding its curling lip on the event-horizon of disaster.
I was a boy. I am not now. I was absent from my boyhood in lamentation for my lost childhood. And still looking back, I am absent from my manhood in lamentation for my lost boyhood. Missing the moment, wasting inspiration.
Just twenty minutes passed, and the meditative boy ouside my window is long gone.